By
this time, Joe's was off and running. "We got the 'in'crowd,
the society crowd, Jesse remembered. "At that time, we
could seat maybe forty or fifty." But stone crabs were
yet to come. In fact, no one then knew that this local
crustacean was even edible. In 1921, James Allison, Fisher's
partner in the Speedway, built an aquarium at the foot
of the bay and Fifth Street. "He got all hopped up on
having marine research done," Jesse said. "I used to go
up in the lab and watch them work." Allison invited a
Harvard ichthyologist down to do research. One of them
came down one day and said to my dad, "Have you ever used
these stone crabs, these crabs from the water?" We were
serving crawfish, all kinds of fish-but not stone crabs.
"Nobody will eat them," Dad said. That was at breakfast.
That day when the ichthyologist came down for lunch, he
brought a burlap sack, full of live stone crabs. He and
my dad went around and around about how to cook them.
Do you broil them, or what do you do with them? My dad
threw the stone crabs in boiling water and that was the
beginning of it. The bay was full of them! When we started
serving them cracked with hash brown potatoes, cole slaw,
and mayonnaise, they were an instant success. We charged
seventy-five cents for four or five crabs, twenty-five
cents for potatoes and twenty-five cents an order for
cole slaw. And this is the way we have been serving them
since. We hit the jackpot with that one!